


Lullaby

by sylaises (Archedes)



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Ficlet Collection, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-16
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-03-07 18:59:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3179588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Archedes/pseuds/sylaises
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She sleeps for days and then not at all. Pre-Temple of Mythal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lullaby

**Author's Note:**

> Nine Solavellan snapshots based on a list of prompts. Not in chronological order.

( _2 gracious paring_ )

She sleeps for days and then not at all.

Lavellan’s dreams are blistering forests, breath of Another World on her face as the fires burn—green eating green, devouring, blackening, between her fingers and across her palm along the heart line. The ash lies thick on her tongue long after she has awoken. She smiles anyway: Haven is wretched and the people know it and there is nothing for it. Hers are not the only eyes smudged with sleeplessness; she sleeps, but her mind is filled with burning. She does not consciously remember the Fade, though her marked hand aches like an old scar when it rains and when she dreams. It is but another piece, scraped off and left behind.

Solas speaks of Arlathan, paints a picture in her mind so pretty she wonders why her dreams of the Fade are decayed and desolate whilst Solas’s are towering crystal, resolute, whole. A kingdom that was once Immortal, and that, too, is another piece, scraped off and left behind. They (the Dalish, Solas means, because his lips turn at the edges, into something derisive and Higher) blame humans because it is easy, he says. But what hope did humans—did mortals—really have against the deathless dreamers of the People, those who slept and awoke and feared nothing but their gods?

There is nothing left but the forest and the alienage, and the crystal spires of Arlathan live on only within, only _for_ Solas. “I wish I could see it,” she says, and it is true, and she feels like a frayed thread that can only look helplessly at that from which it has unraveled. Detached and displaced in Haven with a hole in the sky. Solas speaks of spirits walking the real world (the dissolution of the Veil, leaving both worlds to blend), and all she can taste is ash on her lips. That, she thinks, is the last piece to lose.

( _40 snow in summer_ )

Solas’s laugh is a quiet thing; it is swept away by the wind, leaving behind only a faint smile. It is like him, she thinks—the part of him that is not deliberate, that is spontaneous and unintended and all at once (hesitant, too). It is something that must be coaxed out. It is easier when she doesn’t try.

When they are out, in the Graves especially, she feels more alive. More whole. She lines up an arrow, releases the bowstring, and takes down a demon from thirty paces despite drag from the wind. She stops short, hands into fists, short hair in her eyes, and she grins wildly. “Did you see that?” she asks, though the enthusiasm molds it into a fervent demand. Cassandra is checking the map, gives a response that is vaguely approving. Cole smiles eagerly back—a reflection of her own. Solas laughs.

Closing rifts is all right. It can even be fun, maybe, if she could stop having nightmares of demons (terror) and their arms—too thin too long—reaching for her, claws at her eyes. When their enemies are alive, are men, there is no enthusiasm—no wild grins or hesitant laughs. She has nightmares about them as well, dead men with gaping jaws filled to the brim with maggots, staring at her as they try to speak through the worms, wriggling white as they spill from their mouths. She no longer dreams of burning. This is far worse.

At night, she sweats despite the cold. Summer in Skyhold is akin to winter in the Green Dales, and she is grateful for the way Solas curls around her at night—something (someone) warm to hold. She has yet to go a full night without a nightmare waking her, but she is still hopeful. Sometimes Solas is roused by her, and she is grateful for that too though she would never think to do it on purpose. “Sorry,” she whispers.

“I can help you sleep, if you wish.” Gentle. His smile is soft with sleep, lips warm when he presses them against hers once, twice. It is comfortable and familiar, something to wash away the ash.

“It’s all right.” Still fresh in her mind is the memory of how he had lulled her to sleep and taken her to a dream-woven Haven, but the fear remains—primal—of something she cannot remember. She draws herself closer to him, presses her nose to the thin fabric of his collar. The feel of his arms around her is one she commits to memory, and she lays there—sleepless—until morning.

( _32 semantics_ )

The Dalish clan in the Plains does not trust her because she keeps the company of humans. It is her first taste of existing outside of—apart from—the People, and she can only look helplessly back at the Keeper (apologetic at arms-length). “You must understand,” he reasons, and he glances past her at Cassandra, “that these are troubled times, da’len. The People are dwindling. Clans are dying out. We cannot take chances with your sh… _human_ Inquisition.” He is sympathetic: he looks at her, she thinks, and sees a poor child swept into the service of the shemlen. A shorter, younger Shartan, here to be used and then tossed aside, pointed ears painted over in the holy portraits of their holy human places. The Dalish cannot balance themselves on the fickle, needle-thin memory of human men. Not again.

She knows because her own clan has suffered, though she wonders if her keeper is keeping the worst from her. There had been others with her at the Conclave—older, braver, better suited. She had only been selected to attend because she did not hate humans. An accident of temperament, she thinks; a machination of fate, she is repeatedly told. With her people, she is Junia, the hunter. With the humans, she is Lady Inquisitor Lavellan, who bears the weight of her clan’s name on her shoulders and the weight of the world in her hands.

Back at Skyhold, Solas attempts to be comforting, though he is fumbling in the way of a man who does not personally believe the matter is one worth being upset over, who has been alone and has been able to find solace in it. She is not like him. The rejection leaves her despairing, ashen, because what is she if she is not one of the People?

“The Inquisitor,” Solas answers, taking both of her hands in his—calloused, warm. “There is no elf like you who wields such influence. Take pride in that.”

There is only one Inquisitor, and it is lonely thing to be.

( _4 animosities_ )

Solas’s friend is a demon, and this is something he wears on his face: brows drawn, something ugly and unfamiliar in his eyes as the human mage draws a snarl from his lips. Lavellan tries to imagine how she would feel if things had happened differently: if Irin or Araya were alive and there, victims human fumbling while a shemlen shamelessly rambles on about _necessity_ (she is a hunter, and she does not understand spirits or the Fade or the things that make Solas who he is, though she tries so hard that her failures cut her deep). The look on Solas’s face is jarring and unlike anything she has seen there before.

She agrees to release the demon despite everything, because it is what he wants and she is certain he knows better than she what must be done. His composure has fled him, and she is left groping for a means to handle this man and his fury and grief that run deeper than she can fathom. This is something further: another piece of Solas that he has kept locked away, and it is one she must reconcile with the Solas who patiently (indulgently) suffers her childish inclinations.

It disgusts her—it feels too much like betrayal—but she is frightened of him in this moment. Calm, collected Solas who is now thunderous, untouchable in his rage and prepared to take his due of blood—all without losing control of himself because when she speaks, he listens. She stops him and wonders if it is selfish, and her self-doubt is present even now when she is actively confounding his wishes. But he listens nonetheless, allows the mages to go free with resentment clear in the curl of his lips. She wonders what a Real Inquisitor would have done: she has not sentenced a single person to death since they began bringing them before her for judgment. Too soft, she thinks, and the shame is there again, because Solas does not hesitate when that is all she seems to do.

But there has been so much bloodshed, and she has no desire to see more; it has made her hollow and heartsick and alongside the demons and dead men in her dreams, there too are the families of those maggot-mouthed corpses who have died by the wayside of the Holy Inquisition.

Killing the mages won’t bring the spirit back, but she is certain Solas knows this. Killing them would be an indulgence, but it is not something she feels she has a right to deny him. Yet he permits them to leave, and she can only stand there (hollow and heartsick and arms too full with regrets and doubts) when he, too, leaves.

( _44 needful things_ )

It is a constant source of wonder for Lavellan how Solas keeps warm. She is constantly spotting holes in his old sweater, sticking a cold finger through them and making him jump, then frown. He knows how to sew, mend, and darn, but he is awful at it—worse than her, though her stitches are ugly they are serviceable and that is enough for the Dalish. His come apart after a day or two, loose threads bending out as the hole gapes open anew.

“Inquisitor,” he says patiently. “I am sure you have better things to do than fuss over my clothes.”

“Nope,” she responds (she is leaned over his desk with her chin on her fists). “It’s all right. I can teach you no problem. Nobody even has to know about it.” And then she smiles because the look he gives her is annoyed, because she knows very well how he so hates to be reminded of the things he is _not_ good at.

At the end of it all, they are sitting on one of the sofas in the rotunda, and after many failed attempts she has finally given up on him. There are speckles of red on both his sweater and her sleeves from where he has pricked himself with the needle. Solas reads instead (flipping the pages with freshly bandaged fingers), and she mends it herself, thinking it is good that the sweater is already ugly because she is certainly not making it any prettier.

It is the little things. It is sewing a sweater without a thought spared to the hole in the sky, to the monstrous creatures that spill out of it. He lives and breathes the ethereality of the Fade, yet she craves nothing more than these small moments.

“In _my_ clan,” she begins smugly, reveling in the sigh that follows as she turns the sweater over in her hands, inspecting her work, “even children can mend clothes.”

“Truly the Dalish are models by which we all should live.”

“Oh, you’re sarcastic now, but you’ll be thanking me later when we go back to Emprise Do Whatever.”

“Ah. Does that mean you will _not_ be putting snow down my collar this time?”

“That was Sera,” she protests, scandalized.

“Of course.”

“It _was_. _I_ threw the snowball at your head. Here. All finished.” She holds the sweater out by the shoulders (a fresh stitch to join the half dozen others that line the seam of the right sleeve), but she finds that he is looking at her instead, book forgotten on the end table. “Hey, if it looks bad, that’s not my fault. You should have replaced this with a new one like ten years ago, if we’re being honest.”

He laughs. “Yes. I should have simply walked into a village and bought a new one. An apostate elf.”

“If you put the staff down for five minutes, nobody would know, dummy.”

“That isn’t the issue.”

“Oh. Money. And I guess you wouldn’t steal it either.”

“You’ve been spending far too much time with Sera.”

She sticks out her tongue. “Oh please. I’ve been stealing from humans before I ever even met her.”

“Is that so? I thought your clan avoided conflict with humans.”

“Lots of Tevinter caravans pass through the Green Dales. Mostly goods, though. They learned the hard way not to bring slaves through our territory. You just wait until they all go to sleep and knock out the guard with a sleeping dart. Easy pickings, if you’re quiet.”

“And if you’re not?”

She folds the sweater and lays it in her lap, letting the pause in the conversation drag. It is taking a weighty turn, and she tries to think of a way to turn it around. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve always been quiet. Where did you get that scar on your face, by the way? I’ve always wondered.”

Solas lifts his brow, though she supposes even a child would have been able to pick up on her indelicate attempt at changing the subject. He plays along regardless, putting on a show of great thoughtfulness for several minutes before finally responding with: “I don’t remember.”

“Ooh, you’re lying!”

“I am not.”

“Yes you are! How can you not remember? It’s on your _face_.”

“Well, how did you get yours?” She touches the split on her lip, embarrassed.

“I tripped over a root or something when I was little.”

There is a short moment in which Solas simply looks at her, and then he laughs. Her ears burn, but when she does not say anything further, he asks, “What, are you being serious?”

“ _Yes_. But as far as Varric knows, I got it rescuing a group of orphans from bandits, so zip it.”

“How does that even happen? I thought the Dalish were graceful and sure-footed.” He’s teasing her now, and she shoves at him (but she is smiling too).

“I was _seven_. There were a bunch of sharp rocks, and it hurt a lot, asshole.”

“I’m sorry. Did you cry?”

“For the rest of the month. It was very sad and traumatic. Now put your shirt on before you get hypothermia and die slowly.”

“How specific,” he comments, though he takes the sweater when she offers it to him and slips it over his head.

She adjusts the collar, feeling his eyes on her as she turns the fabric over in her fingers. Smiling a little, she takes his face in her hands and presses his forehead to hers. He smiles again—softer than before, when he closes the space between them, his hand to her chin to angle her lips to his.

It is impulsive, but it is not careless. The angle isn’t right, and she has to shift her body towards him. They are sitting close enough that she can feel him pressing against her, warm through her shirt. His hand moves to the back of her head, teeth grazing her bottom lip, languid and luring. All the time in the world.

At some point she runs her hands over his shoulders, imagines his skin cool and ridged where old wounds have scarred—ones she has seen times innumerable. He has surprisingly many: there is one on his chest, a crude line drawn over his heart, and she runs her finger across his shirt, where she imagines it to be. It—the kiss, the caress—is slow in its sweetness, and he moves his hand from her head to her face, thumb brushing circles against her cheek.

It is the little things.

( _23 divine death_ )

Lavellan suspects him, of course. Solas knows this. She has caused him to slip enough that it would be impossible for him to think otherwise. The curiosity, for him, comes when she does _not_ ask; yet that is not to say that she does not have questions. She asks him many things—things that can be easily answered. What she avoids are her suspicions: whatever she thinks of him, he cannot begin to imagine. If he says something odd, something that she does not quite believe, he is left awaiting an inquiry that does not come.

At night, when she cannot sleep (and this is often), she confides in him. She does not think Blackwall is telling them everything. She is apprehensive about the potion Vivienne has asked her to help create. She wonders about Cole and if Corypheus will manage to bind him now that the amulet does not work (because of her). What Solas has always known is that Lavellan takes refuge in her youth and the subtlety it lends her: she notices things most do not expect her to, and this very underestimation gives her the power to decide at her leisure what to do with what she sees. More often than not, Solas comes to learn, she decides to do nothing. Whatever she suspects of their companions (of _him_ ), she does not think them dire enough to address.

“Why?” he asks, finally overcome by his own, personal curiosity. They share a bed; even now, her head is resting on his chest, above his heart, fingers curled into his shirt. In battle, she moves without hesitation, confident in the knowledge that he will cover her, shield her before any blade or arrow can make contact. She does not know the extent of it, but only that he has lied—is still lying—to her about certain things, and she accepts it.

“I don’t know,” Lavellan hedges at first, and he is aware that she knows what he is really asking. She fidgets with his shirt, plucking at it with her forefinger and thumb. He is frowning; he can imagine her expression—reluctant, uncomfortable at being put on the spot. “I guess it’s…whatever Blackwall—” she enunciates his name, perhaps with the intent of making it clear to him whom she is really referring to, “—is keeping from me: it’s his business, right? I know he’s a good person, and I know he’ll do the right thing. So it’s okay. We all have things we rather keep to ourselves.”

He supposes this is the type of answer he has been expecting. It shames him; somehow, her silence is worse, and he almost wishes she would demand his secrets of him so that he could finally, finally come undone and let go his burden. But she does not, and he cannot. So Solas laughs, and then he asks, “What if he isn’t a good person?”

“I knew you were going to say that. You’re always so contradictory, you know?” she teases, tilting her head up to press her lips against his throat.

“That isn’t an answer.”

“I know. It’s not very fun when people dodge your questions, is it?” Her teeth whisper across his throat; impatient, he realizes. Unlike him, Lavellan is direct with her misdirection, but he is not satisfied, will not be satisfied until he can look at her and for once not feel a surge of self-loathing rising in the back of his throat. “Oh, don’t make that face. If he’s not, then he’s not. Me being wrong isn’t exactly a _new_ thing.” She is still smiling when she leans in again, planting small kisses along the curve of his jaw. It is far too easy for him to forget himself, and he slips his hand under her shirt, fingers splaying across the small of her back as he holds her tight to him.

He sighs, patient in his concession, and allows the matter to drop (he is the last one who ought to be demanding answers from anyone, and he knows this as sharply as he would know a knife in his back). But these are concerns for another time, and he is glad to take solace in her and in the way she pulls his face towards hers and kisses him. Simple and unhurried: she moves quickly, with the fervor and vibrancy of mortality, but she slows for him, and for this he can never repay her.

( _42 a dream forgotten_ )

“Don’t stare,” Irin hisses, and Junia’s eyes snap down to the floor, to her feet. Everything around them is bustling: humans and elves with wooden boxes and fragrant parcels of food moving this way and that. She wiggles her toes and despairs—the boots are uncomfortable and they cause her to stumble when she walks. There are more people here than she has ever seen before in her life, yet they are all too busy to take note of the clumsy elf with too-big feet.

Irin is to her right—he is First to the Keeper, and though he is agitated and harsh she is glad he is there. Humans don’t _frighten_ her, but there is a certain look in their eyes that causes her to falter, and she is grateful that Irin talks to them so that she does not have to. There is another hunter named Araya, and though she is the oldest she too defers to Irin, having little interest in these “distinctly human” affairs. Yet Junia is the only one visibly overwhelmed—the temple is massive, sloping arches built into the mountainside and flanked by towering stone statues with jagged stumps where their heads ought to be. Its decrepitude reminds her of the old elven shrines their clan occasionally visits. She gapes, and Irin berates her again because she cannot help but watch wide-eyed at the humans—tall, broad-shouldered and clad in shining plate metal—that pass through the atrium.

“Grey Wardens,” Araya answers without being asked, arms crossed as she, too, studies them. “Wonder what they’re doing here.” Standing off to the side (powder caked on their faces to hide the vallaslin), they are no more conspicuous than a gathering of idle servants. The humans seem not to see them at all.

“They must be here as a neutral party,” Irin offers uncertainly. But there are hired mercenaries lining the walls (qunari, glinting golden eyes beneath horns wrapped in glinting golden metal) with enough swords to arm a small militia, and that is without counting the templars’ blades. Grey Wardens are another anomaly to Junia, but she supposes their purposes are the same if they are here to keep the peace—after all, she has come only to help Araya see Irin safely home.

The last of the Wardens file inside the temple proper, and once the atrium is emptied but all save them and a few straggling qunari, Irin turns to them. He is without his staff, and Junia imagines that is one of many things contributing to his irritation. “It’s time. Now listen carefully.” If Irin is nervous at all, he hides it well, and his voice is steady and firm. The voice of a Keeper, though one much sterner than Deshanna’s. “Araya, you and I will go and find a place where we can listen without being seen. Humans being the way they are, there is an extremely good chance this will all go to shit. So _you_ —” Junia smiles faintly, and she wonders if he can hear her heart fluttering in her chest (she has fought before, and she will fight again, and she doubts she will ever grow accustomed to it). “—are going to go to the undercroft and find where we hid our equipment, then you are going to bring it back here and wait for us. Understood?”

“I think it might be a little suspicious for me to stand here with a staff, a bow, and a _giant sword_ , Irin.”

He makes a noise in his throat, rolls his eyes so hard she wonders if they are going to get stuck in the back of his head. Araya laughs but she hides it behind one hand, and Irin doesn’t notice her. “Creators, Junia. You have no problem lying to Keeper Deshanna about who stole Hahren Mariel’s knickers. How is this different? Just make something up. You’re holding them for an attending lord or something.”

“It’s one thing to lie to the Keeper. She’s not going to _kill_ me for it. And I—”

“You’re not a child anymore,” Irin cuts her off. “It’s time to _grow up_. You have been a hunter—you have had your vallaslin—for two years now. Act like it. Your clan needs you, so stuff whatever smart remark you have floating around in that head of yours and start cooperating.”

She doesn’t know quite how to react, so she picks at the hem of her shirt, sheepish and ashamed and a little hateful because Irin is right. But she is undeniably scared, and she would much rather go with one of them than be left by herself. Irin, too, seems surprised by his own vitriol, but any remorse is quickly hidden away when he nods at Araya. As they walk away, Junia takes a breath and tries to gain control over her failing nerves.

Silly, she thinks, because nothing has even happened and yet her heart is pounding and her palms are slick with sweat. The qunari standing across the atrium give her a brief glance—fleeting curiosity for the elf left behind—before turning back to talk amongst themselves.

The undercroft is dank and alive with the scratching and scuttling of things Junia does not stick around to see. She never makes it to their weapons—there is a crashing sound, thunderous, and it shakes the very mountainside. Rock and dust rain down on her as the ceiling trembles, and she coughs until her eyes water. The next tremor almost sends her to the floor, but she manages to keep her balance, hand on the wall (grimy, damp), and heads for the stairs. She falls to her hands and knees as she climbs them because of these _fucking_ boots, scraping them and leaving smears of blood on the stone behind her.

When she reaches the top, she catches the backs of two Wardens as they reenter the inner chamber and shut the tall wooden doors behind them. In their wake, in the atrium, the granite floor is rapidly disappearing beneath a growing pool of blood—bodies in the corner (the qunari) thrown carelessly aside, weapons still in their sheaths, glinting golden eyes open wide and flickering (almost alive) in the light from the torches. It reeks (sulfur and copper) and she doubles over, hand over her mouth and nose and she tries not to breathe it in. She wants to run, out the door down the mountain and _away_ but fear—shame—seals her to the spot. Where are Araya and Irin? Where are they? If things went bad, they were supposed to meet here, supposed to—

A voice crying out from within the chamber: desperate, cracking and shaking with terror so raw that Junia can feel tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. The door is there. She could run. She could leave and never look back and spend the rest of her life in quiet self-loathing, gloriously, terribly alive. She could grow old and fat and when she can no longer hunt she can instead pick up her grandchildren and say that she had been a coward, and because she had been a coward they are alive and that is the cruelest irony—that their lives would be bought with the deaths of those she might have saved had she not run. Her clan would accept her back, would weep tears of joy that at least one, _at least one_ has returned home. _At least one_ has looked deep into the eyes of Death, the eyes of the Dread Wolf and all that is wretched in this world, and come back from it to join the legions of those graying and old whose only wish is that they too might have died alongside their kin rather than being alone and _at least one_.

She is thinking of all this, of everything that she could do, when she kicks off her boots (blood on stone warm under her feet) and heads for the chamber doors.

( _8 requiem for the last honest man_ )

Nine weeks come and go, and before the tenth ends Solas returns to Skyhold.

She does not realize how much she has missed him until his arms are around her, and for once the mountain wind does not chill her. He loves her—says it with melancholy in his voice, in his eyes, in the slump of his shoulders—and he leaves. He confuses her, of course, because she recognizes him as a man who conducts everything with a distinct sense of purpose—everything but this, where he is at once hesitant (when she is not) and uncertain (when she is not).

Opposite always, even in their very natures; where Lavellan is one to do things wholly, with her heart on her sleeve and all the feeling within it constantly driving her forward. There is no thought spared to consequences or implications: if she knows something, she knows it well, and she acts. Solas is different: Solas thinks, always, and if Lavellan is wild and boisterous in her endeavors, then he is deliberate and methodical. He carries the weight of things unseen, and he carries them with the solemnity and care he believes they warrant. He knows that knowledge is useless unless applied well.

But this is the intersection. She is ready to act (haphazard and foolhardy), yet she holds back out of care for his own hesitation. He is reserved, yet when he kisses her—feels her hands clutching at the front of his shirt, pulling him closer—he feels his quiet restraint slip between his fingers.

He returns, later, and the faint smile he brings with him causes her to feel as though he has never left. Nine weeks forgotten, nine weeks spent with the bewilderment of a child that does not know what they have done wrong and with the certainty that he would not come back at all.

He is steady and undeniably _present_ when she lays on her side and tucks herself against his chest, listens to his heart, and prays that she will be able to find sleep. But despite this, there is also something intangible about him, and it is not something she can ignore. Even in moments such as these—uncomplicated and quiet—there is a sense of urgency, that there is no guarantee they will ever be like this again.

Always with her is the apprehension, lurking at the back of her mind (a small fanged beast that was born the day he first left and has lingered ever since, gorging itself on the things he does not say), that Solas will one day remove himself to a place beyond her reach.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen such a serious expression on your face,” he says, and she starts, having thought him asleep. He, amused and smiling, pulls away (arms still around her) to look at her face.

“I’m the Inquisitor.” And Lavellan cannot help her huffiness; it is a jab she would have otherwise enjoyed, had she not already put herself into a somber mood. “I have a lot of important things to think about. All the time.”

“Of course. And I am glad to see you taking them so seriously, though perhaps you should try to sleep—”

“Are you going to leave again?” she cuts him off, suddenly, and his smile disappears. There is a hardness to her voice (it surprises even her), a hardness that had begun in Haven and is now moving rapidly towards something she could not begin to imagine. “Because,” she falters for but a moment. “Because you can’t _do_ this. You can’t be here, with me, in my _bed_ , if you’re just going to run off again like that without a word. It isn’t fair.” She almost loses her momentum when she sees that he looks the same way he did when he told her he loved her. Defeated. Tired. She repeats herself more firmly, “It isn’t fair. If…if you left because I didn’t let you kill those mages, then I’m sorry but—”

“No. It had nothing to do with you. Please do not think it did.”

“Okay, but—”

“ _Junia_.” He is pleading, and the words die in her throat—caught between pity for his distress and frustration at yet another derailment. “Please, vhenan. Let us have this. There is so much left to do, but let this one thing be as it is. Please.”

Hollow and heartsick, but for once she is the steady one. She is composed and unaffected, and she looks at him, really looks at him, and realizes how little she truly knows him. It is disheartening, but that is all, and she is surprised that she does not feel more strongly. “You’re asking a lot.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Another thought occurs to her, and this is the first time it does: she loves him too. But if this is what he wants of her, then that one thing she will keep for herself: a single, solitary secret of hers apart from the sea of his own. This, she thinks, is the very last thing to lose.

( _14 younger_ )

When she had been a child, her mother told her a story—something, she said, her own mother had told her, and on and on.

There was once an elven princess, and she was the youngest daughter of the King of Elvhenan, yet her beauty far surpassed that of her brothers and sisters. So lovely was she that she had caught the eye of Dirthamen, he who tamed Fear and Deceit and held close to himself the secrets of the gods. Enamored, Dirthamen approached the mighty King of the Elvhen and offered, for his youngest and most beautiful daughter, the most coveted secret of all: that of his the huntress, Andruil, and how to steal from her a magic bow able to fend off the Tevinter armies that threatened them.

Yet the daughter, kneeled at the door of her father’s chambers, ear pressed to the keyhole, learned of the god’s desire. Unbeknownst to the king, she had wandered outside of the kingdom’s walls and had seen the world of man and had come to love it. She had seen the shemlen children dance and sing while their parents worked, worn hands, wrinkled faces, content though Death shadowed their steps. It fascinated her as nothing in Elvhenan had before, how these human men and women could toil and yet find happiness in their brief lives—of which she had lived many yet.

And so, when her father came to her and delivered his wishes—that she would go and give herself unto the god Dirthamen—she refused. For eight days, Dirthamen himself descended from the heavens, and he gave to her many gifts with the intent of winning her favor: a golden halla that others may know of the god’s love, a silver mirror that would show her anything she wished, a dress woven from otherworldly silks that rippled like a river, a crown of branches taken from Sylaise’s sacred tree, the beating heart of a crow that would stop when malevolent spirits were near, a sieve that could turn water to wine and blood to honey, a necklace whose gemstone—red—swirled as though storm clouds were held within it, and a wooden box in which the winds of the fierce southern mountains were caged.

The princess rejected them all; and so on the ninth day, rage filled the god’s heart, that which had been laid low by her faraway infatuation with the finite lives of mortal men, and Dirthamen took from the Elvhen their Immortality.

When she had been a child, she was taught prudence and priority. Anything for the sake of the clan, lest ruin come from those errant princesses who prize their curiosities over their people: those hopeful and hopeless who cling to childhood and refuse to accept that growing up is about giving away, piece by little piece, the things you can afford to lose for the sake of the things you can’t.

Years later (with moonlight seeping through the stained glass of her room, gently washing over the arm wrapped around her waist and the face pressed against her neck where she can feel slow breaths brushing across her skin) she thinks she feels sorry for the princess whose only crime had been to suffer the love of a god.


End file.
